A Less Perfect Union: Gay Marriage and the Subversion of the Republic

November 6, 2008

Oct 24, 2008Scott Tucker

On May 15 the California Supreme Court ruled, in a 4-to-3 decision, that legal marriage in this state should no longer be reserved for heterosexuals. Six of the seven judges on that court were appointed by Republican governors, with the lone Democrat voting with the majority in this case. According to an estimate by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law, more than 10,000 gay and lesbian couples have married since the first legal same-sex marriages on June 16.

In response, opponents lost no time placing Proposition 8 on the Nov. 4 ballot. Proposition 8, if passed, would change the state constitution so that marriage would be legally defined as being between a man and a woman, and thus would eliminate the existing right of same-sex couples to marry. This does not mean that the marriages of same-sex couples already legally enacted will be automatically null and void if Proposition 8 passes. On the contrary, these marriages are now legal facts on the ground which will figure in class action lawsuits and future court cases as the nationwide legislative battle over same-sex marriages and civil unions unfolds.

Tijuana: Slum of Empire?

Rocky Neptun

El Centro, Tijuana; August 13, 2008. With heavy heart, vacillating with intense rage; I stand on the corner of Revolution and Third Avenues, and watch as several hundred federal police officers block off all of 3rd Avenue, between Madero and Constitution, with huge buses. As startled tourists run for taxis and Mexican shoppers scurry away, 250 "Federales" in ominous, dark-black uniforms, carrying machine guns, automatic rifles and a few grenade launchers, spread out along the streets.

NATIONALISM THEN AND NOW...

November 26, 2006

Economic boycotts, blockades, and divestment campaigns are all strong medicine in the realm of international policy. Has the U.S. embargo against Cuba done anything to undermine that regime-- or has it hardened the will of the Communist Party? Did the U.S. economic blockade of Iraq do anything to undermine the Ba'ath regime-- or did the real burden fall upon many thousands of the poor, sick, elderly, and infants?

In the case of South Africa, there is wide acknowledgement that economic divestment was one factor among many which helped to end the apartheid regime. The resistance movement within South Africa deserved greater credit.

In recent debates about using economic boycotts to pressure the Israeli government, some have claimed that any analogy whatsoever between Israel and South Africa is outrageous. But analogies are not equations. Historical analogies are necessary, otherwise every nation without exception is "exceptional."

The Divining Rod: An Introduction to the Work of Karl Kraus

Thomas Scott Tucker

"Experiment Station for World Destruction"

"When the age died by its own hand, he was that hand." This underhanded tribute came from Bertolt Brecht, an aphoristic summary of the life and work of Karl Kraus (1874 - 1936), the Viennese poet, playwright and satirist. In a similar spirit, Walter Benjamin wrote of Kraus, "All the martial energies of this man are innate civic virtues, only in the melee did they take on their combative aspect. But already no one recognizes that any more, no one can grasp the necessity that compelled this great bourgeois character to become a comedian, this guardian of Goethean linguistic values a polemicist, or why this irreproachably honorable man went berserk. This, however, was bound to happen, since he thought fit to begin changing the world with his own class, in his own home, in Vienna..."

APHORISMS by Karl Kraus

From Half-Truths & One-and-a-Half Truths: Selected Aphorisms of Karl Kraus, edited and translated by Harry Zohn, University of Chicago Press, 1990. This book is out of print, and the excerpts below have been rearranged under different headings. Readers may also be interested in Karl Kraus, a study of his work by Harry Zohn, published in 1971 by Frederick Ungar Publishing Company, New York.